Virtual Culinary Tourism in the Time of COVID 19

Abstract

As the COVID-19 pandemic closed borders and shut down travel in 2020, culinary tourists have turned to virtual experiences for satisfying their curiosity about new foods and tastes. Individuals as well as industry professionals have focused their energies on cooking shows, cookbooks, food memoires, blogs, and both formal media and informal social media. These activities represent a philosophical approach to tourism as a state of seeing or attitude that represents the humanities-based definition of culinary tourism as "eating out of curiosity" rather than the more industry-driven one of food-motivated travel to a destination. These virtual formats may be reaching a larger number of audiences than pre-COVID-19 culinary tourism marketing and including a larger number of potential destinations that tourists previously would not have considered visiting in person. They also are creating opportunities for educating people about various dishes and food cultures. Those opportunities may be "whetting their appetite" for future travel, resulting in heightened interest in culinary tourism experiences in the future. It is possible that these audiences will be more aware of the nuances of food cultures and of the impacts of tourism and will therefore seek experiences that are more multifaceted and more sustainable for all parties involved.